Client: temple bar company
Project: changing the image of Dublin’s temple bar
What were MAKE asked to do?
Temple Bar Company is a representative group of cultural businesses, pubs, restaurants and hotels from one of the world’s premier evening and night-time economies - Dublin’s Temple Bar. They asked MAKE to help develop its response to problems in the city’s night-time economy. In particular, the TBC asked MAKE to provide a presentation of global best practice in the night-time economy and to then workshop ideas for change that the organisation could build into its own placemaking strategy.
How did MAKE do it?
Our presentation was based on a selection of NTE ‘change’ and ‘turnaround’ projects from our own MAKE Case Study Library of over 250 successful night-time projects in the UK and globally. We used exciting and inspirational images of these projects (from Alberta to Romford) and explained to the audience the need for an holistic approach to the night-time future of places.
We ran workshops with our skilled moderators to generate and capture useful local ideas and to test how best practice from the UK and beyond might practically work in the Irish and Dublin cultural, legal and municipal context.
What happened next?
The project’s outputs were incorporated into the future placemaking strategy for Temple Bar. In return we learned much about what Dublin was doing right; interventions that many UK towns and cities, indeed cities globally, can adopt in order to managed their night-time economies better.
What unique value did MAKE bring to this project?
The MAKE After Dark Library is a unique global resource of night-time economy best practice. We were able to draw a number of useful exemplars from it for the benefit of Dublin. The impact of seeing how other locations are managing similar problems helps towns or cities realise the issues they face are rarely unique and that approaches exist which if carefully adapted, could work for them without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’.